I’ve always thought of Alain Connes as the unchallengeable world-champion opaque mathematical writing, but then again, I was proven wrong.
Alain’s writings are crystal clear compared to the monstrosity the AMS released to the world : In search of the Riemann zeros - Strings, fractal membranes and noncommutative spacetimes by Michel L. Lapidus.
Here’s a generic half-page from a total of 558 pages (or rather 314, as the remainder consists of appendices, bibliography and indices…). I couldn’t find a single precise, well-defined and proven statement in the entire book.
4.2. Fractal Membranes and the Second Quantization of Fractal Strings
“The first quantization is a mystery while the second quantization is a functor” Edward Nelson (quoted in [Con6,p.515])
We briefly discuss here joint work in preparation with Ryszard Nest [LapNe1]. This work was referred to several times in Chapter 3, and, as we pointed out there, it provides mathematically rigorous construction of fractal membranes (as well as of self-similar membranes), in the spirit of noncommutative geometry and quantum field theory (as well as of string theory). It also enables us to show that the expected properties of fractal (or self-similar) membranes, derived in our semi-heuristic model presented in Sections 3.2 and 3.2. are actually satisfied by the rigorous model in [LapNe1]. In particular, there is a surprisingly good agreement between the author’s original intuition on fractal (or self-similar) membrane, conceived as an (adelic) Riemann surface with infinite genus or as an (adelic) infinite dimensional torus, and properties of the noncommutative geometric model in [LapNe1]. In future joint work, we hope to go beyond [LapNe1] and to give even more (noncommutative) geometric content to this analogy, possibly along the lines suggested in the next section (4.3).
We will merely outline some aspects of the construction, without supplying any technical details, instead referring the interested reader to the forthcoming paper [LapNe1] for a complete exposition of the construction and precise statements of results.
Can the AMS please explain to the interested person buying this book why (s)he will have to await a (possible) forthcoming paper to (hopefully) make some sense of this apparent nonsense?
Connes, geometry, noncommutative, Riemann
2 comments
Posted in geometry
Written on Mon, 07 April 2008 at 6:32 pm
Tags: Connes, geometry, noncommutative, Riemann
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April 9th, 2008 at 8:36 am
43 pounds? Well, I won’t be buying it then. Thanks for the tip. Although, I can’t help thinking there must be some interesting ideas there….
April 9th, 2008 at 9:48 am
I have seen this book in the UA library last week (now it is not there anymore :))) and browsed it for few minutes (I should try to read at least the introduction…). I noted many strange things there, among which an appendix about vertex algebras (is there any relation between moonshine and Riemann???), although the content seemed to be a mixture of strings, fractals, noncommutative geometry, and maybe other things. I didn’t figured out whether this mixture lead to something…Care for an opinion?